The European Parliament and the EU Member States have reached an agreement regarding the EU’s Emissions Trading System, ETS. According to this agreement, shipping will be excluded and IMO will have the responsibility, Danish Shipping notes.
The agreement, which Danish Shipping supports, will include shipping in the trading system from 2023, in case IMO’s negotiations on a CO2 strategy haven’t made sufficient progress.
“It has always been a priority for Danish Shipping to rectify the European Parliament’s demands for an EU solitary approach against the negotiations in the IMO. The new agreement is a success. It gives IMO the responsibility to come forward with an ambitious agreement in 2023. Only then, the EU will act if progress has been insufficient,” Danish Shipping says.
Casper Andersen, Director of EU Affairs at Danish Shipping, is optimistic about the agreement as he says that for a long time now “the Parliament has been dissatisfied with the pace and ambitions of the IMO negotiations and therefore continuously maintains the pressure by proposing own initiatives.”
With the new agreement, IMO will be pressured to provide a strategy but the IMO countries have been given the time, Casper Andersen adds.
Last week, ICS welcomed the decision made by EU. ICS Director of Policy, Simon Bennett, has commented on the provisional decision by the European Union not to include shipping within the full scope of the regional EU ETS, saying that this demonstrates confidence within the EU institutions in the current progress being made at IMO to develop an ambitious strategy that will deliver additional CO2 reduction measures, consistent with the shipping industry’s own vision of zero emissions, as soon as possible.
Finally, ICS believes that this decision also shows a welcome recognition within the EU, including the European Commission, that ETS, is an inappropriate tool for application to an industry like shipping. This is because of the huge risk of creating serious market distortions and the administrative challenge of incorporating tens of thousands of ships operated by thousands of SMEs into a discredited system which the EU is already struggling to reform.
